So this summer I’ve decided to try to read as many of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels as I can (there are six, the first three of which are regarded as classics, plus around a billion written by his son, Brian Herbert, from notes he found in his dad’s garage). I’ve been trying to get through the first book since I was in fifth grade and the bizarre and not too successful movie adaptation came out. A couple years ago, I made it halfway through on Kindle (on my phone, which is pretty impressive). This time I’m ready.

Why am I telling you this, other than the fact that I haven’t talked about painfully nerdy stuff for several weeks now? Well, Dune was published in 1965 and was critically and commercially successful enough to have turned a lot of people on to its (at the time) radical concepts of planetary ecology; the idea that we need to pull back and pay attention to the world as a whole, because everything is connected. On the desert planet of Arrakis, the survival of its inhabitants–and by extension, the galaxy, because plot points–depends on their ability to take this holistic view.

Clearly this is something we need to do here, now. As on Arrakis, the summer on Earth is again displaying record temperatures, along with drought, wildfires and unprecedented heat-related deaths. The macro is coming back to haunt the micro (which is us. We’re the micro).

As I read about the characters in Dune trying to survive the alien desert with its extreme lack of moisture, I keep seeing warnings about the heat wave coming to us here in the Willamette Valley this week. I wanted to reiterate the warning and share some tips on how to prepare for the coming heat.

According to the highly diverting Department of Homeland Security website Ready.gov (which also contains helpful hints about tsunamis, shooters, pandemics and nuclear explosions but not, sadly, zombies), here are the basics:

If your home is not air conditioned, find places to go that are. Work in a state office, like me! Or, go to the public library, the mall, anywhere you can spend some time safely during the hottest hours.

Drink lots of water. Like seriously. You know you don’t drink enough as it is. Drink water before you feel you need to, because in this kind of weather you are already dehydrated if you feel thirsty.

DO NOT leave pets or children in an enclosed car. We know that, right? It goes triple this week. Check frequently on children and elderly. Make sure your neighbors are prepared.

Eat popsicles. Not on the website, but that’s because I think it was scrubbed by the incoming administration.

It’s science time at the Parenting Success Network blog. That’s right: that means it’s time to take to the internet and google (it’s what we used to do before we started talking to Siri, but after we went to the library and pulled out the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature) “parenting.”

Wikipedia, just below it, defines “parenting” according to the democratic will of the (internet-abled) human race: “Parenting or child rearing is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the intricacies of raising a child aside from the biological relationship.” This is an accurate and utterly uninteresting encapsulation. More intriguingly, however, it goes on to say:

“Parenting styles vary by historical time period, race/ethnicity, social class, and other social features. Additionally, research has supported that parental history both in terms of attachments of varying quality as well as parental psychopathology, particularly in the wake of adverse experiences, can strongly influence parental sensitivity and child outcomes.”

Okay. So in other words, the quality of parenting depends on a lot of different things. What were we born with? What have we lived through, and what did we take with us? How many other things get our attention, energy, concentrated will? No wonder there are so many parenting blogs. Sheesh.

Most interesting, though, are the questions that those who come before us have asked; the search engine equivalent to the stones cast at the feet of the Omphalos of Delphi (a situation I may have just completely made up). Here are some of the top questions:

“What is a bad parent?”

This one kind of breaks my heart, not only because I don’t like to think about how bad my parenting is, but because I picture someone typing this question into the search field after having been accused of being one. A better question: “What is a good parent?” It goes back to that thing about the google bubble.

“What does it mean to be a parent?”

This is a good question, because it could be practical or purely philosophical. Clicking through brings up that pesky Wikipedia entry as well as one from, randomly, The Ministry of Education in Guyana.

Later, as verbal and logical functioning revs up to higher levels, more sophisticated jokes, based on discrepancies between facts and perceptions, come into play.

I knew a 10 year-old who found this joke so brilliant she repeated it with maddening regularity: “Two muffins were sitting in an oven. One said, ‘Is it getting hot in here?’ The other said, ‘Oh my god! It’s a talking muffin!'” That one stayed funny for a while.

Now in my house we’re going meta, discussing joke mechanics.

And just last week my oldest, now 13, left a note for my on top of the dinner dishes:

This week’s post is by guest contributor Jessica Magnani, who compiled this information on free and low-cost Summer events for families in Albany. Last week she gave us activities in Corvallis. Thanks again, Jessica!

While most of Oregon Farmers’ markets accept SNAP benefits, many also offer a matching program, which doubles SNAP purchases dollar for dollar up to a certain amount — meaning you could get $10 worth of food for only $5 from your SNAP account.

After some reminders about the importance of self-care (including one from Parenting Success Network boss Aoife Magee), I was thinking about some of the things I’ve been trying to do for myself. As I have written–and said–countless times, we can’t fill someone else’s cup unless we have filled our own.

In case this image is not clear enough (or if you still consider your cup to be half empty), imagine sitting next to your child on an airplane. If God forbid there should be an emergency and the oxygen masks come down, whose will you attach first? If you answered “your own,” you are in the company of the approximately 2/3 of respondents I just made up. Our instinct is to meet the child’s needs before your own, so it’s natural to want to put their mask on first. However, it’s also the wrong choice. Because if something goes wrong you need to be able to help, and you can’t help if you can’t breathe.

So there. How does this apply to the day-to-day? Without plane crashes and such?

I remembered that I hadn’t told you about my new car. New to me, anyway. It’s a 1993 Toyota Tercel, and it’s pretty much so uncool that it comes back around to cool again. To say it is an improvement on my previous car, a Volvo that could allegedly not be repaired following a crash into a curb one icy day because the company no longer made the parts. I took to calling it The Death Car and refused to take on passengers unless absolutely necessary, believing it would someday kill me, Christine-style.

Thankfully, this did not happen. It did not happen because I finally resolved to replace it and finally bought the Tercel from a mechanically inclined friend who had driven it for years before passing it down to adult daughters. The Volvo I donated to my workplace, using the great company V-DAC, for which they netted $25. Sorry, workplace!

Anyway, the point of this story is that once I decided to focus time and energy (and a surprisingly small amount of money) on my own needs, namely a reliable commuter car capable of more than 8 miles per gallon, I was able to shrug off a huge burden of shame and anxiety that was interfering with my ability to parent.

Am I recommending that you go out and buy a new car, for parenting purposes? Sure, I guess. But wait, there’s more. The Tercel is a manual transmission, something I hadn’t driven in about 20 years (ask me about that someday). I have been rediscovering the joys of riding up a learning curve. Between practicing driving a stick (thanks once again to the mighty Art of Manliness blog) and taking as many different routes to and from work as I can (thanks to decent mileage), I’m keeping my brain healthy and burning some new neural pathways. And that’s a good way to fill your cup.

I encounter foster parents quite a bit in my line of work. Of all the categories into which people can be sifted, I believe that foster providers have one of the bummest deals around.

I tend to approach them as fellow professionals, who are just doing a job like the rest of us. I am thus buying into one of the most common myths about foster care, which is that it’s something you do for money. In fact, pretty much any other pursuit, including selling lemonade and becoming a philosopher, is more profitable. Foster care is asking everything from a provider that one expects from a biological parent, only on time and with precise documentation.

Foster parents, I salute you.

Turns out, as I found on a little stroll through the search engines, there are quite a few myths about foster care out there. Some of them are probably preventing folks from becoming foster providers. That’s really too bad, ‘cuz we need ’em.

REALITY: The median age of children in foster care in the U.S. is eight. Almost 50% are over age 10, and an estimated 70% have siblings in foster care.”

Are older kids more “difficult?” Not necessarily. It means they are more likely to have had multiple foster placements and can sure use a stable home. There are a lot of resources and services available to assist with older kids and teens. Plus, no diapers!

MYTH: I have to stay at home to be a foster parent.

Umm, this is the 21st Century. People work. A foster parent is a regular human, and parenting is hard no matter what. You are allowed to live your life and drive kids to as many sports practices as you want. You can also get a babysitter (Solo comes out May 25th!).

You don’t need to have (or have had) biological children in order to be a foster parent. All you need is to want to parent. As a verb.

If you are in the least bit interested, there are a lot of resources out there. Here are some specific to Oregon. We have an overwhelming need in this state right now. You might find you’re more able, and ready, than you think.

Viktor Frankl, in his influential book Man’s Search for Meaning, drew from his experience as a prisoner in the concentration camps at Auschwitz to assert (and I don’t think anyone would argue) that the way in which we approach our lives determines our ability to find fulfillment and purpose within it.

He writes, “What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our question must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

This conclusion is echoed by the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, who in his long-form essay The Myth of Sisyphus attempts to imagine what motivates the king from Greek mythology whose eternal punishment in the afterlife was to labor to push a huge boulder up a hill, near the peak of which it would inevitably slip through his hands and roll back down to the bottom. Camus argues that, when faced with even incredible, incomprehensible hardship (such as that lived by Frankl, above), we must use direct our free will to the conclusion that “The struggle itself […] is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Finally, noted (to me, anyway) writer Jeremy Anderberg, in the great blog that everyone should read, The Art of Manliness, lists a few of the many character-building aspects of fatherhood before hitting on this discovery of meaning. He concludes:

“No matter your position in life — CEO, cubicle automaton, day laborer, stay-at-home dad, entrepreneur, freelancer, trade worker, unemployed — it’s very possible, perhaps even probable, that your greatest, most important role in life will be that of parent. Of provider. Of protector. Of wisdom-purveyor. What that looks like can vary widely from man to man, but have no doubt that raising and loving your children well is one of the most significant things you will do in life.”

Parenting, as you know, can be joyful and full of fun and mirth. It can also be grinding, harrowing, even absurd, and in the march of sleepless nights and seeming lack of evidence that our children are learning or even paying attention, it can be hard to find the motivation to be nurturing, patient, humble and persistent in our work. That’s when we must let the struggle be enough to fill our hearts. Unlike Sisyphus, however, we will experience the joy, the fun, the mirth, if not over this hill, then over the next, or the next.

“These guys who fear becoming fathers don’t understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of childraising is not the child but the parent.”

I would like to remind you that this is only my family’s experience with trying out a system for chores, and that what worked (or didn’t work) for us may not apply to you. It’s a process.

If you look back at the earlier entries (which, by the way, automatically multiplies the value of this post!), you will see that my wife and I had decided to abandon the large whiteboard, with magnets representing each child that moved around the chores in age-appropriate fashion. We discovered that they liked to keep their own stable chores, so the next iteration was as follows:

“Instead of rotating chores, each child now had their own laminated sheet with a list of duties. They could mark them off as they went with a pen, or draw pictures around them, or pull them down and lose them under the sofa. Their choice!”

That was last year. Here’s how it has panned out.

They still like having their own lists. After choosing to lose them under the sofa several times, all four of my daughters have asked us to affix their list on a wall or door where they can see and/or notate it: the seven year-old has added “hug Mama.” I don’t know how that wasn’t in the first draft.

The seven year-old also can’t remember what’s on the list from day to day. Part of this, I think is the literacy bias, which posits that what is on the page is more important than what she perfectly well has in her motor memory by now (given that fully half of her chores consist of getting dressed and brushing her teeth and hair). Part of it is that she can’t actually read yet, so she has to check with someone every time she undertakes her chores.

Next time: pictures instead of words? That she can move from one side to the other with velcro? That sounds like a fabulous idea, but I will leave it to you crafty parents that I know are out there.

Anyway, there has been some revision of chores, and some elimination of redundancy. But for the most part, I think this system is working.

An interesting issue came up in our Nurturing Fathers class recently: is there a right time to introduce a concept to your child when they might not otherwise know about it? Some examples: terrorism, drugs, political protest, gender ambiguity, racism.

Granted, this is a disparate list of topics, and the answer is going to be different for each situation (and for each family). But in each case, the parent did not know what, or how much, the child knew or from whom they might have learned it.

I described the scenario a few weeks ago in which I took my daughter, 12, to the doctor and she got tangled up in a list of questions about substance use. She didn’t know what they were about, but knew enough about how drugs could be harmful that she was upset by the questions. I felt like I should have prepared the ground for her, given her more of a context for what she was being asked to think about (she doesn’t go to public school, by the by). But what should I have told her? And how much? And when?

So many questions! What’s the best way to approach a difficult topic with your kids?

The first step, because it can determine what course to follow, is to turn it around:

Ask your kids what they know about it. What do they think? How does it make them feel? What’s important here is not to identify the source or cast blame, but to find out what your child has to work with. Listen non-judgmentally, for content and for emotion. You might be surprised at what you learn!

Now, remember not to render value judgments on what they have told you, even if it is inaccurate or offensive. You don’t what them to shut down and quit sharing. Instead, offer to help them to find out the truth behind the subject: look it up together on the internet or at the library. While you do this you can teach them how to discern good sources of information from bad (we know how to do that, right?).

What if your conversation is not pure research, but touches you or your family directly? How do you give difficult information? I came across a helpful post on this very thing.

By approaching the problem in this way, you get to teach your that it’s possible to learn and process challenging or even scary topics. And you get to spend some time together, to boot.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this lately, but my wife Kyrie is super well trained in child development. We’re talking the whole gestalt ball of wax: Waldorf, Montessori, Charlotte Mason, the regular OSU kind. So when she tells me that what is going on with our youngest daughter is not an extraterrestrial brain-swap or demonic possession or something equally drastic, but just an expected shift in the child’s growth (known in Waldorf arcana as “the seven year change”), why then I believe her.

Never mind that we have seen nothing like this with her older sisters. The next one up went through a rough patch at around the same time (in fact, I covered it pretty thoroughly while it was happening). That one didn’t want to sleep without an adult in the room even though she had been doing so just fine for a couple of years now. My solution to that had been to 1.) shunt her younger sister into our bedroom and sleep in her bed, which required me to be quite a bit shorter than I actually am, or 2.) move the seven year-old into the grownup bed and take hers, thus allowing the younger one to continue sleeping. Neither particularly worked, and the whole operation was almost certainly prolonged by my accomodationist method.

So when this one adds an inability to sleep for more than an hour at a time to a complete loss of her words to express a need for help (the words having been replaced by loud grunting and yelling), I tried to wait it out. I can get up once an hour, no problem. Get her some water, get her a homeopathic lozenge, pack her back into bed. Repeat.

The results were apparent after a couple of nights of this plan. She continued not sleeping and so did I. Turns out that neither of us do well on sleep deprivation. Something had to change, but I was fresh out of empathy. We were both pretty sure that she was just never going to sleep through the night again. And we both felt terrible.

It was at this time that I was preparing for the Nurturing Fathers class and came across the following passage: that we as parents want our children to know that “you are lovable, and you are capable.” Let’s read that again.

“You are lovable, and you are capable.”

It was enough. That night I reminded her of how good a sleeper she is and that this was a temporary phase. We would get through it. In fact, it was already better. Her hard work had already paid off.

I’d like to say that it turned around right away. We’re kind of still working on it.